It's less about what you did in school and more about your network outside of school.
Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
81–90 of 132 posts
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> few, if any, employers will care about your GPA "Elite" careers care a lot about GPA.
I can guarantee no one really cares about your GPA, especially after your first job. If it's your only proof of competency/intelligence that's been validated by a third-party, they'll care, but if you have other outside evidence and interview well, no one will ever even think to ask, even in elite settings. I, for one, have never put my GPA on my resume.
No, I've seen "elite" careers care about your GPA after your first job too.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> few, if any, employers will care about your GPA "Elite" careers care a lot about GPA.
I can guarantee no one really cares about your GPA, especially after your first job. If it's your only proof of competency/intelligence that's been validated by a third-party, they'll care, but if you have other outside evidence and interview well, no one will ever even think to ask, even in elite settings. I, for one, have never put my GPA on my resume.
> I can guarantee no one really cares about your GPA
When a buddy of mine was interviewing at hedge funds, a few of them didn't just want his undergrad GPA, but also his high school SAT scores. He actually got shit from one of the interviewers because his French SAT scores were shady... the dude had a few years of finance experience and a PhD in theoretical physics. YMMV.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> few, if any, employers will care about your GPA "Elite" careers care a lot about GPA.
Indeed. Certain institutions will not even consider a candidate who has not gone to a top tier University AND graduated with 3.5 or greater, unless of course they have some sort of connection with someone working at that institution. For first job out of college
I've seen certain institutions want "elite" job experience, degree from top school, high GPA, and sometimes high test scores. This is not for the first job.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#85All the frat guys I ever knew had well off parents. They were going to make more than everyone else due to that alone. Of course, being surrounded by privilege, parties, and sorority girls eager to score a rich boy hurt their grades. That doesn't really matter though. They graduated. Some even took an extra year or two to do that. It didn't matter. They did fine. Being a prince has advantages.
Some of the frats at my alma mater charge $5k a year. I would imagine being able to pay 20k or more might self select to some already well-off kids.
The fraternity I was in charged about $175 a quarter. We didn't have a house yet, as a newer fraternity, so several of us rented a house together. Usually, 5 of us lived in the house, so we split rent 6 ways, and fraternity dues paid a 6th person's share of the rent. We ran college parties as fundraisers, charging $5 for unlimited beer and "jungle juice". (We started at $5, then shrewd bros would raise the price near $30 by midnight.)
I learned how to read a room, operate a night club, talk to (and avoid) police, be drunk without causing a scene, run meetings, talk to people to get stuff done, manage projects, and act normally in awkward situations.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#86Dear Silicon Valley, Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network. One which will help them form good career connections, as well as platonic and romantic relationships. Fraternities create their own unique culture (traditions, handshakes, songs, idioms, etc) to tie people together, so keep that in mind. Please lea…
This has been near the top of my "app ideas" notebook for 10 years, and I've never found any serious attempt out there. I view this as a game theory problem, whose solution would be facilitated by a social network that modeled whatever the problem is. If it ever succeeded, it would probably be in continual hazard of turning into that Black Mirror episode about reputation scores.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#87Not surprised. I was in a fraternity, and no we didn't haze at all. Between all the events (of which less than a third are parties) and dedication it takes to keep the thing from barreling into the ground you learn a lot of real life skills. First, there's selection bias. We would only take guys that were really sociable, somewhat hard working, competitive, and with decent grades. Most fraternities were the same. "Fr…
Not surprised. I was in a fraternity, and no we didn't haze at all. Between all the events (of which less than a third are parties) and dedication it takes to keep the thing from barreling into the ground you learn some basic lifeskills and some harmful worldviews.
First, there's confirmation bias. Our social group's identity was build around feeling superior, so we chose to value the things we were good at, and forgot about the ways in which we did harm to everyone around us. Also, probably a lot of bad things happened to us that got washed away in a boozy haze.
Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school, which has no impact on our being seen as "meathead rich" whatsoever. Money wasn't as much of a factor as I realized, as most of the bias was outside my control. My house was probably 40% minorities, which is a statistic I'd like to use to show how little I understand about racial inequality. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half.
It's really easy to get comfortable with being a fundamentally bad person. Just invert the emotional response: fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that instead of ashamed. See how easy that was? Also you can point to how other people do it too. Tech companies are elitist, for example. We were shining examples of virtue defined precisely in the way that most benefited us.
Second, power structures in the business world closely resembles that of our frat world. Despite this being a serious problem in society, it benefits me directly so I choose to see it as en example of why frats are good instead of why the business world has problems. Want to see how ridiculous the inequality is in the university world? I'll brag about some stats. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
I like to think of a fraternity as a non-profit company run by students of our personal selection. It doesn't technically turn a profit, but we do! That's what nonprofits are all about, right? Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration for some reason I can't possibly fathom.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. Let me check my facebook. Actually it was thousands. I was very important. I knew important people. I really like important words like "president" and "executive".
Eventually I had to join the real world and it turned out that being part of an exclusive club full of people who were taught for years to value tribalism and self-importance pays off: I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
FTFY
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#88[deleted]
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#89Unless you're already about to fail, few, if any, employers will care about your GPA, and joining a large network of college graduates who share camaraderie can't hurt when it comes to finding well paying positions and moving up in organizations
If you don't care about GPA, why do you need me to be a college graduate? I'm genuinely confused about the point of college. I can spend four years drinking and partying without going into debt if that's what I need to get a job.
Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
#90One positive thing about being in a fraternity -- it provides experience in dealing with and resolving conflict in a large organization.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
Just an extremely non-rigorous hypothesis.